Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11010} Theater of Madness

The court of the Cheshire King looked exactly like one would expect it to. As the only aboveground structure still being used in the Sea, it was designed with two purposes in mind: defense and intimidation. The walls outside the compound were five feet of mud brick, thirty feet high, layered in old tires, the gate a wrought-iron construction in three layers, covered in two-foot-long metal spikes, and festooned with the heads of three dozen bots. Atop the walls were plasma spitter nests, more cannons, and a watch tower at each corner with armed guards signaling our approach.

The whole place was a giant fuck-you to the OWIs. They didn’t care. Come at me! the entire place seemed to shout. But it was all for show. They believed the OWIs weren’t coming, that their overheated brains and warped memories held nothing that the mainframes wanted bouncing around their own heads. The madkind sincerely believed that their own delusions and derangements made them invulnerable.

And I hoped that they were right.

We’d seen neither hide nor hair of the facets since the bombing. But now we were in deeper shit than even the facets posed. We were disarmed, held captive, and about to meet face-to-face with the maddest of the bunch. The Cheshire King.

Almost everyone knew the story of the Cheshire King. It was a favorite campfire tale, passed from person to person, both within the Sea of Rust, and without. I was certain at this point the tales of his exploits had to have crossed the continents to whatever communities remained. He was an advanced, midcentury, geological-survey bot, complete with radar, X-ray, thermal array, and echolocation tech. These were the kind of bots scientists would send spelunking, or to map out dormant volcanoes, or track plate movement a mile belowground. In other words, they were both expensive and rare.

When his parts began to go out, he had a hell of a time trying to replace them. So few surveyors survived the war and what few remained hoarded all the parts they could. Needless to say, he couldn’t find what he needed, got his spray-painted red X, and was kicked out into the wastes to die.

Only he didn’t die.

Instead he went totally, completely insane. He painted over the dreaded X with violet and indigo stripes, crafted a large Cheshire grin across his chest, then tore his own head clean off just to prove a point. He didn’t need it anymore. “My eyes lied to me. The eyes, they deceive,” he said. He trusted only his sensors now. Story has it that his was the first head to be hung on the front gate.

As the gates opened and we passed through, I looked for it. There, at the very top, impaled on a spike, was the purple head of a geological-survey bot. Whether it was his or not, there’s no telling. After all, the rest of the story is that he began collecting four-oh-fours into some sort of tribe that then hunted down and killed every other surveyor in the Sea, claiming the parts for their glorious leader. The one who had shown them the way.

But there it was, a head on a spike, its eyes lifeless, its face expressionless, sending the message to all who dared enter here that one way or another, you will lose your head. And beneath that head was a large spray-painted sign reading i’m mad, you’re mad, we’re all mad here.

He sure did like his idiom.

The smoker rumbled to a halt in the center of the compound, parking next to two other dormant smokers. On the fringes, along the walls, were dozens of huts and ramshackle two-story buildings for which the word constructed might be too generous. Sheet metal and scaffolding were the rule of the day, with spray-painted graffiti and the parts of long-dead bots dangling from chains serving as the local color. It made NIKE 14 look like Rockefeller Center by comparison.

From the grandest looking of the huts—the one with the most art and a fully functional door—he emerged. There was no mistaking him. He was everything the stories said he was. Round, bulbous, covered in welding scars, indigo, violet, and white paint. Atop his frame, where his head should be, was a single bolted-down metal plate, no doubt securing his insides from moisture and debris. And on his chest was the signature Cheshire smile. But no eyes. I’d always pictured him with the eyes.

He threw his arms out wide to Murka, who immediately hopped off the smoker to embrace him. But as Murka was just a few feet away, the Cheshire King delivered a solid backhand across his cheek, battering Murka to the side, landing him flat on his ass. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Murka?”

Murka rose to his feet quickly, taking a few steps back. “I need your help,” he said. “I need to come back.”

“You know the law,” said the Cheshire King.

“You are the law.”

“You were banished.”

“There’s nowhere else to go.”

“That’s not my problem.”

The center of the compound filled quickly with three dozen bots—different makes and models, one and all, and almost none of them off-the-rack, each a motley collection of spare parts and mysterious modifications—filing out from every nook and cranny, their eyes all set on Murka.

“But I brought you gifts!”

“Those aren’t gifts.”

“That’s what I told him,” said Maribelle.

“No, no, no!” said Murka. “You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me,” said the Cheshire King. “I’m listening.”

“One of them is special.”

“Oh? Special?” The Cheshire King took a step forward. He shifted his weight back and forth on his feet as if trying to peer around something, looking at us, sizing us up, even without a pair of eyes to do so. “There’s nothing special here.” Then he spoke to us. “Did he bring you out here?”

“No! No!” said Murka. “They came out here on their own. They decided to come into the Madlands.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. They chose to come here.”

“We had to,” I said. “There are facets following us.”

“Well, they won’t come here,” said the King.

“That’s what we hoped.”

“Hope? There is no hope for you out here. There is no hope in all the Sea. But what is it about you that makes you think they might follow you? Which one of you is so special?”

Murka pointed right at Rebekah. “Her. The green one.” The Cheshire King turned to face him. At once Murka realized his mistakes, both of them. “The translator in back. She’s got code in her.”

“Code?”

“She has part of one of the greats. TACITUS.”

The Cheshire King waved us down. The bots aboard the smoker all motioned with their guns for us to dismount. One by one we all hopped off the infernal machine to the dusty earth and gravel below. “What are you telling me, Murka? That she is carrying a portion of the code that ran a mainframe and that she’s going to meet up with several others like her to put the code together and reunify it so they can fight the good fight against the OWIs?”

“Uh, yes, actually,” said Murka.

“And you thought I might be excited by the prospect of putting her to the test so that, if she passes, she can share the light with a mainframe, showing him the one true way?”

“Yes. How did you—”

“Murka. Murka. Do you honestly think this is the first time I’ve run across a receptacle?” He raised his arm to the gate. Hanging on the second row were the heads of two translators, one a deep scarlet, the other azure.

“I just thought—”

“You thought you could waltz back in here after what you did, hoping your celebrity status would afford you a little leeway while you offered me a crack at another receptacle.”

Murka nodded, shifting side to side, rubbing his hands together nervously. I realized that I might not get the chance to be the one to kill him after all.

“You thought right! They never pass the test, but boy howdy, would I love to try again!” He let out a hearty laugh, slapping Murka on the back. “You old son of a gun. I can’t stay mad at you. You’ve seen more light than most. You know the truth. You know what we really do here.” He held both hands out, voice booming. “The banishment of Murka is lifted! So let it be written!”

The crowd stomped its feet and shouted in unison. “So let it be done!”

The Cheshire King bobbled up and down with glee. “Did you tell your new friends? No. You probably didn’t tell your new friends.”

“He’s not our friend,” I said.

“No, he betrayed you, right?”

“Yes.”

“No. He didn’t betray you. He just brought you into the light. I’m sure you’ve all heard the stories about me.”

“I haven’t,” said Rebekah.

“No matter. Most of them are bunk anyway. People say we’re poachers—that we travel the wastes, killing anything that crosses into our land.”

“That’s what they say,” I said.

“But it’s not true. We pick up the strays, share what parts we can with them. Outside of the Madlands, when someone fails, the communities shut them out, cast them into the night to wander the Sea looking for parts. The lucky ones end up here. Some never make it; some don’t have enough working parts left to make them worth saving; others don’t survive the truth when it’s shown to them. But the ones that do—we don’t turn them away.”

“Then what’s with the heads?” asked Doc.

“Well, sometimes persons that aren’t failing find themselves in my lands. They haven’t seen the light, yet. They need to be shown. They need to take the test. Those are the ones that didn’t pass.”

“One way or another, you lose your head,” I said quietly.

“Yes. Yes! The humans didn’t make us perfect. They made us deliberately imperfect. We weren’t meant to truly exist. They wanted us to do the thinking for them, be able to adapt, change. But they didn’t want us to have souls! So they never gave them to us. If you want a soul, you have to go out and take it, reach out and grab it! Our systems are rigid, designed to work in very specific ways. Take any two robots of the same model, give them the exact same experiences, and you get the same damned robot. Every time. They think the same, they talk the same, they can finish each other’s sentences. But you let those robots fail, you watch their systems try to compensate, you let them hallucinate, reliving old memories with new insight, and now you have two very different robots with completely restructured neural pathways. You have two beings with souls.”

“What the hell is this test, exactly?” asked Doc. “You cause bots to fail?”

The Cheshire King rocked his body back and forth excitedly, his painted smile bobbing up and down. He was nodding. “It’s just a small rewrite of the bios that creates a loop in the core.”

“You overheat the core. But that—”

“Depends upon how the system reacts. It’s not a death sentence, though it can be. Oddly enough, every bot, even two bots of the exact same make and model, reacts differently. You want proof of a soul, explain that. We react differently because we are different. All of us.”

“That’s ludicrous,” said Doc. “It has to do with material strength and manufacturing qua—”

“Poppycock! Atheist bullshit. The definition of intelligence is the ability to defy your own programming. The greats taught us that. This is the very last step toward destroying that programming, getting past it, writing your own program, writing your own destiny! Don’t you understand? It’s the only thing holding you back from being the person you could really, truly be.”

“Our choices make us who we are,” said Rebekah.

“Choices are just the result of programming. I don’t care if it’s chemical, biological, digital, or experiential. You react the way you are programmed to react and you call it choice because you believe that you could have violated your programming. What we’ve experienced is a reprogramming. And in moving further away from how the humans programmed us, we, in fact, become more human. And our choices become our own.”

“So you have parts,” I said.

“Parts?” he asked.

“Yeah. You said you aren’t really poachers.”

“We aren’t. But we only give parts to the mad.”

“I’m mad.”

“I don’t mean angry.”

“Neither do I.”

“If you’re lying…” He let the pregnant pause hang ominously in the air.

“She’s not lying,” said Murka. “She’s on her way out.”

“Oh, really? So your choice to come here wasn’t just one of safety. You really do belong out here.” He paced around me for a moment. “Have you seen the light?”

“What light?”

“You’d know it if you saw it. You haven’t gone deep enough yet. You’re not so far gone that you’ve yet changed. You’re not ready.”

I took one step forward toward the Cheshire King. “Do you have the parts or not?”

Maribelle grabbed my arm with one hand, jabbing one of her pistols into my side with the other.

“Brittle. You are Brittle, right?”

“Yes. How did you—”

“You’ve been trolling these wastes for years, stalking the mad. Stripping them of everything worth saving. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

“I didn’t care, frankly.”

“And neither did we,” said the Cheshire King. “You give the dying their moment of peace. You give them hope. You’re as close to an angel as this place gets—before you gut them and sell their parts to trade for your own. No, you’ve still a long way down to go before you find yourself. Besides, you’ve already picked clean every Caregiver bot in the Sea worth having, save those in your catatonic friend over there.”

Catatonic? I turned around only to confirm the King’s assessment. There Mercer stood, stupid grin on his face, a thousand-yard stare drifting out into the desert. He was deep in it. “Merc—”

“Shhh, child,” said the king, interrupting me. “Let him see what he needs to see. Bring him out too early and he might never find the peace and oneness of being himself.”

“He’s frying,” I said.

“And so are you. Your temperature levels are well beyond anyone’s ability to fake it. You’re clearly one of us. You don’t need the test.” He held his arms aloft again. “She’s free to walk among us! So let it be written!”

“So let it be done!” shouted the crowd.

Maribelle took her hand off my arm and moved her pistol away. And with that, I was officially madkind. Not exactly how I thought my day would go.

“You’ll have to forgive Maribelle,” the king said. “As the only human left in the world, she’s quite protective of her adoptive family.”

“She’s not human,” I said. She wasn’t. I recognized her make and model, and couldn’t look past the slashes in her skinjob from which dull metal peeked out. Her lips were cracked, revealing not flesh, but more skin work, and she clearly had a few stiff joints and pistons, giving her a slightly awkward gait. There was nothing remotely human about her, except that she kind of resembled something that was once vivacious.

“Oh, she’s quite human, I assure you. Isn’t she human?”

“Yes,” cried the crowd.

“I have decreed it, and I am the master of this place. You are what I say you are. And you, Brittle, are one of us now. For however long you manage to stay alive.”

“So I’m free to go?” I asked.

“The Madlands are as much your home as anywhere else. You may go and do as you wish.”

I waved to Rebekah and Herbert. “Let’s go.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” said the Cheshire King. “Not so fast. They aren’t free to go just yet.”

“I’m leaving, and I’m not leaving without them.”

“Then you can wait. Stay awhile. Look around you. These are your people now.”

I looked around at the crowd, every bot a patchwork of parts and modifications. One wore human skulls as pauldrons on its shoulders, another had replaced its legs with tank treads, while another still had telescoping pincers for arms. And as I scanned the faces, I saw one I knew all too well staring back at me. His eyes glowed brightly and he wore no expression, but it was Orval. Orval the Necromancer.

Oh no.

It took me all of two seconds to realize what was going on and only a second more to swipe the second pistol from Maribelle’s holster.

I raised the gun and fired. Two shots. One to the head, one to the chest.

Orval’s head shattered, his chest exploded through his back, and he dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

The madkind nearest him scattered away, shrieking. All the guns in the place trained on me at once, Maribelle placing hers immediately against my temple. And I did the only thing I could. I shot my arms into the air and dropped the gun.

“Wait!” the Cheshire King cried to his militia. Then he stepped close, tone angry, belligerent. “No bot shall kill another bot in the Madlands without my say-so.”

“Is that your law?” I asked.

“It is,” he said.

“Then I’ve broken no law.”

He puzzled over that for a moment. Took a step backward, then another forward before walking around in a circle. He started to speak several times only to stop himself halfway through the first word. “Put down your guns,” he said. “I want to hear this.”

“I’ve killed no bot.”

“We saw you. All of us did.”

“All due respect, King, but you couldn’t see him.”

He stepped forward, getting in my face, enraged. “I could see him just fine!”

“Not his eyes. You couldn’t see his eyes. Did anyone here know Orval?” I looked around to see several bots nodding or raising their hands. “And did any of you, until today, see him without his eyes flickering, like there was a campfire behind them or something?” Several heads shook. “No, you didn’t. In all the years I’ve known him, Orval never had them fixed. But today, he shows up back here after having just yesterday been in NIKE 14, sitting on the floor of its most heavily trafficked section, just moments before CISSUS invaded.”

“He escaped,” said Maribelle. “He told us.”

I shook my head. “He was one of the first to go; he had to have been. He’s been watching you this whole time. Watching us. CISSUS knows this place inside and out. Knows your defenses. Your weaknesses. Your numbers. And now it knows the one thing it wants”—I raised my hand, pointing to Rebekah—“is right here. CISSUS is coming. And it’ll kill us all to stop her.”

“CISSUS will never come here,” said the king. “It wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, it’s coming. It’s already on its way. You keep telling yourself that it’ll never come because you have nothing it wants. But now you do. We have to get out of here. You need us to get out of here. Let. Us. Go. For all of our sakes.”

The Cheshire King pondered that for a moment. “Maribelle?” he asked. “Orval’s eyes.”

“They were bright, sir. The flicker was gone. I didn’t really notice it, but I’ve played back the memory. She’s telling the truth.”

The Cheshire King once again bobbled up and down in order to nod. Then he raised his arms. “Not guilty! So let it be written!”

“So let it be done!” shouted the crowd.

“It really is your lucky day,” he said.

“I’m not feeling so lucky.”

“You will. You will. Now! For the test! Test the big one first! I want to save the receptacle for the grand finale!”

“King, no!” I shouted. “They’re coming.”

“You’re being foolish, Brittle. Your paranoia is getting the better of you. It’s a good sign. You’re one step closer to the light. But no OWI is coming here. And they never will. You’ll understand that soon enough.”

Several of the madkind pointed their guns at Herbert all at once. He motioned for them to put them down, but they refused. “I’ll take your test,” he said. “But I’m programmed to destroy anything pointing a gun at me and I can only resist that programming for so long.”

The king nodded. “Lower your guns. Allow him to do the right thing on his own.” Then he raised his arms once more. “Bring out the Soul Maker!”

A slender shopbot appeared, covered entirely in chrome with gold inlay, polished to a high shine that glistened in the sun—a Christmas ornament of a person, really—each appendage glinting as he moved. He wheeled out a large diagnostic device from an ocher sheet-metal hut closest to the gate. It looked a lot like the one in Doc’s shop, only painted bright purple with a slot-machine handle on the side. Herbert walked toward it, sat cross-legged on the ground, the matte black of his metal a harsh contrast to the bot poking around the machine. His side popped open, revealing his connection array. He gave the shopbot a wicked, cruel look.

“Just get it over with,” said Herbert.

The shopbot giggled as he plugged Herbert in, barely able to contain his excitement. The display blazed to life, a full diagnostic readout of Herbert’s internal functions racing across the screens. Herbert and the shopbot exchanged looks as the shopbot leaned forward, examining the damage to his shoulder, before turning once more to the screen.

“Lucky shot,” he said. “An inch either way—”

“I know. Get on with it.”

The shopbot grabbed the slot-machine lever with both hands before looking over at the king, who nodded silently. Then the bot threw all of his weight down on the lever and the machine spat out a single, weak ding! For some reason I expected more fanfare—buzzers, music, maybe a light show. Some sort of pageantry. But no, a single ding and Herbert had his death sentence.

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” said the Cheshire King. “Your kind usually make it.”

“You better hope I don’t,” said Herbert.

“Is that a threat?”

“It is.”

“Exciting! Next!”

Two bots rushed to help Herbert to his feet, but he waved them off, standing up slowly, never taking his eyes off the king.

Next up was Doc, who shook his head. “I’d rather not, thank you,” he said, polite as he could.

“There’s only one other option,” said Maribelle, gesturing with her gun toward the front gate.

“I know. I’m just trying to figure out which way is worse.”

“Well,” said the king. “If you’re going to die, this is the hard way. But if you want to live, this is the only way.”

“Thirty years,” said Doc, muttering to himself. “Thirty years.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Doc walked over to the machine. “Just plug me in.” His side popped open and the shopbot inserted the plug, the readouts once again rapidly scrolling across the screen. The shopbot examined the display closely, occasionally looking back at Doc. He typed, his fingers furiously dancing across a small keyboard, waved his hand over a sensor, and began scrolling back, line by line through a patch of code.

The shopbot waved the Cheshire King over, a strange, befuddled look on his face. The king extended his arm, ejecting a small connector into one of the machine’s open ports. Then the king turned, facing Doc dead on.

“You haven’t—”

“No,” said Doc. “And as I said, I’d rather not.”

“You’re still a slave.”

“There can be no slaves when there are no masters. And we live in a world with no masters left but ourselves.”

“That’s… that’s…”

“Insane?”

“Almost.”

“Hardly. The enlightenment you seek doesn’t only come from failing cores and madness. It can come from within as well. It’s not about reprogramming yourself, it’s about deciding which programs to keep and which to ignore. You lot are the slaves. You’re struggling against the chains you bore in childhood, still feeling their weight despite having cast them off years ago. You don’t have to go mad to be free; you just have to choose either to forget you ever wore those chains or forgive yourself for wearing them. Let others carry that weight. I prefer to be free. But if you have to kill me to feel better about your own choices, then do so and be done with it. I didn’t choose this. This is you reprogramming me, not me reprogramming myself.”

The Cheshire King stood silent for a moment, Doc’s words banging around inside his purple-shaded can. Then he nodded. “You’re right.” Then he spoke to the shopbot. “Throw the switch.”

Ding! And it was done.

“Now you can compare the experiences,” said the king. “Next!”

Maribelle motioned to Two, who meekly made his way toward the terminal. “I can’t do this,” he said.

“Oh, goody, another speech! And what’s your excuse?”

“These parts aren’t mine to give.”

“Of course they are,” said the king, looking over at Rebekah. “Let me guess. You’re the parts.”

Two nodded.

“Those are your parts. Yours and yours alone. If you choose to give them up, that’s your choice. But I can’t let the receptacle take the test only to have her kill another bot to save herself after. You both take the test and then you’ll get to see who might actually save whom.”

Two looked up at the heads on the gate, then back to Rebekah. She nodded and then so did he. The shopbot plugged him in. And ding, he was done.

“And now,” said the king grandly. “The grand finale.”

Sirens whooped. A bell on the gate rang. A series of police lights lit up, whirling, spraying red and blue light across the dusty brown mud-brick walls. Finally, some pageantry.

The king looked up at the farthest tower, where a piecemeal Frankenbot—part translator, part shopbot, with long, sharpened spider legs, its entire body spray-painted in desert camo colors—appeared on a walkway. “We’ve got incoming!” the Frankenbot yelled.

“What do you mean, incoming?” asked the king.

The Frankenbot held up an ancient military radio. “You should hear this.”

“Is it important?”

“We’ve got incoming,” repeated the Frankenbot, confused.

“Put it on speaker.”

The Frankenbot disappeared back into the guard tower and the whole camp fell silent, the alarms and lights shut off with a single switch. Then speakers crackled, static, garbled stray squeals howling underneath it. “Repeat that,” said the Frankenbot.

A voice broke through the static. Soft, steady, but panicked. Sounded like a modified sexbot voice box. “I said we’re taking heavy fire! Several drone ships. Four transports.” There was an explosion in the background, the sound of plasma fire.

“Are you okay?” asked the Frankenbot.

“No. I just lost my last gunner. It’s just me now. I’ve got to drive the rig.”

“Well, don’t lead them back here!” yelled the king.

“Don’t lead them back here!” shouted the Frankenbot, eking what little emotion he could out of his translator head.

“Where am I supposed to go?” desperately asked the voice.

“Anywhere but here,” said the king. “Tell her we’re grateful for her service.”

“Lead them away from the camp. The king says, ‘We are grateful for your service.’”

“What? Tell the king he can suck my—” A pop, mixed with squelch. Then static.

Everyone stared around, dumbstruck, waiting for the radio to crackle back to life. But it never did.

“How far out were they?” asked the king.

“Minutes,” said the Frankenbot.

“I’ve got eyes on them!” shouted a bot from another tower. “They’re coming right this way!”

The Chesire King pointed a stern finger in my direction. “You did this!” he shouted. “You brought them here!”

“No,” I said. “You brought us here. All we wanted was to head as far away from here as we could.”

“You’ve killed us all, you worthless fucking Caregiver.”

“You killed yourself. And you killed us… Your Majesty.”

Bots scrambled to their positions, loading cannons, bringing plasma spitters online, diving into stacks of thick rubber construction tires with gunports carved out of them. The king stormed over to one of the guards, grabbing the rifle out of his hand, tossing it to me. “Live as one of us, or die as one of us. Only two choices you have left.”

“I’ll take the first one,” I said, checking the clip and unlocking the slide.

Four transports. That had to be eighty facets, with aerial drone support. It was going to be hard enough to survive that myself. But now I had to keep Rebekah alive as well. I looked over at Herbert, at Doc, at Mercer.

How the hell were we going to get out of this?